Quickly Save Pictures From The Web Using a Hotkey

Do you save a lot of pictures from the web? If you do, then there are some easy ways you can make the job easier. Opera users can use a nifty trick to quickly save pictures from web pages – simply point the mouse pointer to the image you want to save, and while keeping the CTRL key depressed, click on the image. This opens the Save As dialog box. Hit the Enter key and image gets saved. If you use Firefox, you can install the DoubleClick Save Picture extension. This add-on enables you to save images by double-clicking on the image. Both these approaches are browser specific, so if you use a different browser such as Chrome or Internet Explorer, take a look at the following solution which is browser independent.

SavePictureAs is free tool written in AutoHotKey, the Windows macro-creation and automation software utility, that allows saving of images on any website using a user defined hotkey. All you need to do is place the mouse pointer over the image and press the CTRL and the Spacebar keys together, or any key combination of your choice. Pressing the hotkeys causes the script to automatically right-click on the image, select the “Save image” option from the context menu and then click on the save button thus completing the process. The entire sequence happens rapidly and all may get is a brief glimpse of the Save dialog box.

Since SavePictureAs is basically a macro script that automates mouse clicks, it should work on all browsers and all websites that allows users to save images. This means that for this tool to work correctly, the website shouldn’t prevent users from right-clicking on images. For example, you can’t use SavePictureAs on Flickr because Flickr uses a custom right-click menu.

SavePictureAs will automatically save images to the hard disk at a location defined by the user. The destination directory can be configured or changed by clicking on the program icon in the system tray or notification tray in the taskbar and choosing the appropriate option from the Settings menu. You can also configure 5 different alternate destinations and quickly switch from one to the other, also by using user-defined hotkeys. The 5 locations can also be chosen from a favourites toolbar.

Other options include the ability to prompt the user for filename during saving, rename the last saved picture, and see history of last 30 image saves.

Download SavePictureAs as a Windows EXE file (.zip) | Mirror: Dropbox link
Download SavePictureAs as an AutoHotkey script (.ahk, needs AutoHotkey to run) | Mirror: Dropbox link